Targeting Strategies

THE ABILITY OF political parties, candidates, and political movements to target their messages to a particular audience is a crucial component of contemporary political campaigns in the United States. Campaigns target different aspects of their messages at different groups of voters, whom the campaigns segment according to a variety of characteristics, including, but not limited to, political party, age, gender, ethnic background, socio-economic status, profession, religion, and geographic location. Targeting strategists use polling data, focus groups, and even door-to-door canvassing to identify, which messages will resonate best with each segment of a voting public that may potentially support a candidate or initiative at the polls. Over the course of history in the United States, each party's targeting strategy has changed along ethnic and geographic lines, among other segments. However, despite shifting allegiances among some populations, each party has always counted on the support of certain segments of the voting public.

Use of targeting strategies in early political campaigns in the United States was primitive, if present at all. Early political campaigns of the late 18th, and early 19th, centuries depended on campaign tools such as rallies, pamphlets, and the partisan press. These early campaign strategies were not targeted at any one segment of the voting population. Rallies sought to attract as many people as possible, regardless of political affiliation or other identifying characteristics. Gradually, political campaigns began to target their messages at different audiences. The election of 1840 saw Whig candidate William Henry Harrison triumph over incumbent Democrat Martin Van Buren, by focusing on Populist politics. Harrison's campaign targeted the frontier commoners, in contrast to the aristocratic supporters of Van Buren, marking perhaps one of the earliest forms of targeting strategy.

While Harrison and his presidential successors keyed on these strategies of trying to give the people what they wanted, these strategies were still a far cry from the sophisticated political targeting strategies we see in contemporary political campaigns. Most notably, these early campaigns were not engaged in polling or other means of research to find out what was actually important to voters. This practice would not become prevalent until the late 19th century, when the reform movements of that period employed polling data to focus on issues that concerned voters the most.

In 1896, William McKinley triumphed over William Jennings Bryan by branding himself in a way that better appealed to the preferences of the people and, more importantly, by employing one of the period's new media developments: direct mail. McKinley used the U.S. Postal Service's new rural home delivery to distribute over 250 million pieces of campaign literature to voters.

By capitalizing on the use of new communication with a important segment of the electorate, rural voters, McKinley was able to target a group of voters who had previously been difficult to reach due to their somewhat isolated status compared to urban voters. McKinley's focus on the rural voters of that period through specifically tailored messages and new media technology (direct mail) represented an important step toward modern political targeting strategy.

In modern models of political campaign communication, targeting strategy is often referred to as voter segmentation and, along with positioning, and strategy planning and implementation are three elements of the broader practice of political marketing. The concept of political marketing emerged from political strategists' adoption of product marketing principles. The traditional four P's of marketing are product, promotion, price, and place of distribution. Bruce Newman identifies four P's in his widely used model of political marketing. These are product, equivalent to the campaign platform; push marketing, which includes grass-roots strategy; pull marketing, which recognizes the role of the mass media in the campaign; and polling, which gauges public opinion and provides the campaign with a measure of feedback from voters.

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